We wuz spammed, so all comments are deleted

A while ago a self-identified sociopath asked us to delete their comments, for reasons unspecified (perhaps pertaining to words/phrases which would be identifiable in later publications, which is a legit reason in our view).

But, given that this blog is on a crappy little shared hosting account, we never quite got around to going through all the posts to look for these comments, and frankly, didn’t want to spend the time.

And soon after that, all comments were suddenly deleted. This was a prelude to being bombarded with 12,000+ spam comments and pings. To add insult to injury, we got very nice correspondence from business in Australia who were losing SEO rankings due to these malicious pings coming from our site.

So, the only way to efficiently go through these was to delete all the comments, but this time on our own, rather than by surprise attack. We regret this — because we had some really great discussions. But, we hope we’ve fixed the problem.

We’ve now installed some additional security, honeypots, spam catchers, you-name-it. We’re going to check the way-back-machine to see if we have some older versions (pre-spam attack) of the site on that that we could save for posterity.

We, of course, don’t know if the comment-deletion –>spam-attack was related to our desultory behavior in failing to remove comments at the request self-id’d sociopath. It could have been the WordPress/server police responding to the over-pinged businesses in Australia. But this is the type of thing that a sociopath would do — fret over some long-ago comments in a backwater blog, and, then, spam attack their way into solving the problem. Way overkill, if you ask us.